Sebastian_Hagen2 comments on Timeless Control - Less Wrong

19 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 07 June 2008 05:16AM

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Comment author: Sebastian_Hagen2 07 June 2008 10:32:05AM 1 point [-]

I'm trying to see exactly where your assertion that humans actually have choice comes in.

"choice" is a useful high-level abstraction of certain phenomena. It's a lossy abstraction, and if you had infinite amounts of memory and computing power, you would have no need for it, at least when reasoning about other entities. It exists, in exactly the same way in which books (the concept of a book is also a high-level abstraction) exist.
If that sounded wrong or like nonsense to you, please taboo "choice" and explain what exactly your question is.

I also have a question of my own, regarding the rock-hill-system:

If you isolate a subsystem of reality, like a rock rolling down hill, then you can mathematically define the future-in-isolation of that subsystem; you can take the subsystem in isolation, and compute what would happen to it if you did not act on it. In this case, what would happen is that the rock would reach the bottom of the hill.

How does this isolation work? Do you assume that the forces acting on the system from outside stay constant (in some undefined fashion), without explicitly modeling the outside? If I assume *no* further interactions with the outside, I don't expect to see the rock rolling down the hill, since there's no planet below to gravitationally attract it. Or was the planet supposed to be part of this system?